Workers!

I had a lovely surprise today. I heard scrabbling noises around my house, and when I went out to see what was going on, I found a worker preparing the cracks in the foundation so he could fill them in. He’ll have to let the filler harden, and then he’ll come back and paint the foundation with a sealer. The sealer is black, which I’m not sure I’ll like. If not, I can paint over it with a lighter color. Or I could wait until I got used to it.

But that’s an issue for another day. Today, I am delighted to see progress being made.

It’s funny how so often, one job depends upon another, sort of like a reverse of the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built.” The workers have rock to put around the house, but they can’t do that until the they put down the weed barrier, and they can’t put down the weed barrier until they build up the dirt around the house, and they can’t build up the dirt around the house until they seal the foundation, and they can’t seal the foundation until they fill in the cracks, and they can’t fill in the cracks until they dig out the dirt that’s around the foundation.

Luckily, I’m not the one having to do all this, and the person who is doing it doesn’t seem to mind the work.

Even luckier, the weather should hold for a few days until the filler has cured. It’s one of those projects that can’t be done in cold weather because the concrete filler would disintegrate, and all that work would go for naught.

[An interesting aside; interesting to me, anyway. Seeing the word “naught” made me wonder how it was related to the word naughty, since the two words don’t have much in common, and it turns out that “naughty” does come from “naught.” Apparently, in the fourteenth century, naughty referred to a person lacking in wealth, and over the years, came to mean someone lacking in morals. Does that mean back then that the poor were considered bad, perhaps poor because they were bad, as people so often surmise even today?]

But, neither naught or naughty have anything to do with the matter at hand, which is . . . workers (at least one, anyway) are here working!

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What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God

Are Book Trailers a Good Idea?

rainbowSomeone asked me for advice on how to get people to see his book trailer and then called me negative when I explained how difficult it would be. I admit I’m burned out when it comes to promotion. I’ve spent the past five years researching book promotion in all its many facets, tried hundreds of different things, and I still don’t know how to turn a sleepy seller into a best seller, though I know a lot about what doesn’t work, or at least what doesn’t work for me. Other people do the same sorts of things I’ve been doing and find a pot of gold at the end of the promotion rainbow, but I’m still searching for the rainbow.

Book promotion is a lot like the house that Jack built. You have a book you want to sell, so you create a video trailer to promote it. Then you have to promote the video that promotes the book you want to sell. Then, you join Facebook to get more viewers for your video, so now you have to promote your FB page that promotes the video that promotes the book you want to sell. And on and on and on.

Some people can just throw a book out there and make a fortune on Amazon, but the rest of us have to promote. Have to find a way to get people interested in us and then in our books. As I said in What Works When It Comes to Book Promotion?, the first authors to blog or use the various social networking sites to promote their books found a strong readership, but now all of those means of promotion are so common that they are simply an expected part of being an author.

It’s the same with book trailers. The first people who created book trailers to promote their books did well, but now video promos are just an expected part of being an author. Even if the video is great, the problem is getting people to see the video.

Sometimes people will stumble across a book trailer when they are surfing Utube, but it’s not as if people by the thousands will be searching for his book trailer. I wanted to hear Madonna’s “Playground” the other day, so I used the search function to find it since I knew what I wanted to listen to, but what if I didn’t know there was a song out there I’d like to hear? How do I find it?

The problem is, you have to promote the book trailer as assiduously as you promote the book. If I knew how to get people to see his trailers, I’d be good enough at promotion that I’d be selling millions of books.

Still, book trailers are a good idea, and the better they are made, the better they will do. I don’t want to discourage him from making his video because . . . who knows? His might catch people’s attention and go viral. At the very least, it will give him something other than the book itself to promote.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+